Narrow orchard systems for future climates (AS22002)

Video transcript

The second dot point there is the objective for our Narrow Orchard Systems project broken down into five key points there. And and it's all really, focused on making sure our orchards are safer to attract a labour force, which of course has been a real big problem the last few years more, more profitable, uniform and there's accelerated adoption of robotic and sensing technology. So I've always sort of seen this as being part and parcel with the the work we're doing with respect to narrow orchard systems. So it's not just about tree training, but it's also about the technology that is appropriate for what we call narrow orchard systems. And of course, the final point there is about climate resilience. and sustainability.

It's a five year project that commenced in June this year and it's actually more than five years, about 5. 5. The usual sort of carry over into a final, an extra financial year in 2028 for the delivery of the final report, which is great having a project of this sort of duration. We hope to be able to at least get some pretty good bits of work done.

The project team, so our little partners and team, so yeah, as Marguerite said, AgVic leads the project. DPIRD Western Australia is a partner, University of Queensland, New South Wales DPI, SARDI, and Plant and Food Research are all partners in the project and I've listed the people are in each one of the agencies that are working on this project.

And there's obviously people in this webinar whose names appear there. But I thought this photo captures pretty much all of the key people involved in the project. And most of you, if you, I'll go from left to right, that's Ken Breen from Plant and Food. He was our host when we did a recent trip to the site with doing that the FOPS project. Next to Ken is Mark O'Connell, Steele Jacob, Alessio Scalisi, myself, Darren Graetz from SARDI. And that's Richard Oliver. Richard Oliver's in Sensing Guy based in Hamilton in New Zealand. Is that Liqi there? Yeah, and Liqi, the second last guy is Liqi so, Liqi Han, he's University of Queensland, so they're a partner in the project, and Kevin Dodds on the far right from New South Wales DPI. So yeah, I think that's quite a nice photo to show, some of the key players in the project. And in the background, of course, is the narrow row, I shouldn't call it that. It's the FOPS experiment that Plant and Food Research have been doing for quite a number of years.

So yeah, I thought to, at the start of this presentation, I'd just give a bit of a definition of what we mean by narrow orchard systems. And it's really our starting point for the work that we will be doing. So, I've got there four key points. So, first of all, narrow orchard systems is about 2D, narrow hedgerow canopies, what are often referred to as a fruiting wall. It's about narrow road spacings. In other words, two metre row spacings. It's about widely spaced trees within a row. So, not a high density, ultra high density down the row but actually having trees spaced at two to three metres between the trees. And then the what I'd call the training systems. The training system is about multiple vertical leaders arising what is referred to, arising from what is referred to as a cordon, and that expression is quite commonly used in viticulture, as a training system. We're basically laying a horizontal structure, limb, in other words, from which vertical leaders arise, and you're looking at, six to ten vertical leaders arising from that cordon.

So that's basically the starting point of what our Narrow Orchard Systems is all about, and we'll be doing work to look at things like rootstocks and how you can actually train to a cordon system. We'll be looking at obviously different crops and of course in different environments as well.

And with respect to a bit more background, there's already obviously work being done, not only in Australia, but overseas. So this is, shows some of the background work that's already been done with respect to Cordon systems in Australia. So, we've been working on using Cordon on, in our in our pear experiment here at Tatura. Those photos there on the left hand side, the two photos there are firstly the Tatura trellis or open Tatura trellis and a vertical system using a six, well, it's an eight leader on the open Tatura and a six litre on the vertical training system. Directly underneath them is a block of plums from a commercial guy at Swan Hill who's been using a cordon system for plums. Next to that is a photo of cherries. A cordon system on a traditional v, traditional Tatura trellis V system where there's, somewhere between six and eight vertical leaders arising from the cordon. And then above that it's just showing the, the, basically the a V system of nectarine and a vertical system of nectarine where I think Mark O'Connell was playing around a bit with using a cordon system on nectarines.

So there's a bit of background already been, in, in terms of a cordon system in Australia. In the United States, there's often referred to as a UFO system, which has been around for quite a while and again, it's, obviously a planar type canopy using a cordon system where the trees actually leaned over and, the uprights arise from that main stem where the, where the cordons laid at a bit of an angle to prevent the end, to prevent the dominance of the vertical leaders arising from close to the the trunk. But yeah, again, that's on cherries. That's Greg Lang, the guy there, who's obviously done a lot of work and along with Matt Whiting on this system of training trees into planar systems using a cordon. And then probably the, the most similar work to what, we originally what we are planning is doing as part of this project is, work being done in Italy on what they refer to as the Guyot system I've added narrow road pedestrian Guyot because, the photo there on the right is a two metre row spacing and trees at two metre height, and the Guyot training system is where you actually have trees from a nursery that have already got feathers on them. As this, as the middle photo there shows a guy, training the the vertical leaders. That's a tree that's just been planted. So, the Guyot system is a registered trademark, by the way of having trees from a nursery that were already feathered in the right position, so you can just basically have a those vertical leaders straight off the shelf, so to speak. The photo there on the left too is an interesting one, because ,and Dario will be doing a bit of this work in Western Australia where the cordons are actually arched over each other to stop them from, when you're trying to bend over cordons, you can often crack them or break them. So, that method there is being used to try and avoid that from happening. That, I think, is referred to as a double Guyot system. And, of course, the work that's been done in New Zealand as part of their future production systems project. I've, I've added a few more words to the description of it because I think it's a narrow row, tall planar cordon system.

So, where they landed is and there's a photo there of Mark O'Connell by the way with his arms outstretched in the, one of the treatments that was a 1. 5 metre row spacing. But I think where they landed is, the preference for a 2 meter row spacing , and the critical thing from the bit of work that was done in New Zealand, and this was probably the impetus to, for us to, do the work in Australia and obviously get the funding from Hort Innovation, was that yield response function that's shown there with light as per, Stuart Tustin's publication in Scientia Horticulturae, you can see that, you're getting yields some of those dots are getting up around, 200 tonne per hectare. And that is well, that's exceptionally high yields. And a light, corresponding to a light interception of, getting up towards 80%. Obviously with a narrow row, tall trees the amount of light that can be intercepted is obviously getting very high and associated that with the work that I've done is, very high yields.

So what are we going to do? This slide here is lists of sites where we're doing both setting up experiments as well as some demonstration sites. Here in Tatura, we'll have both a reasonably large experiment as well as a demonstration block. So we'll be working on pear, apple, plum, nectarine and cherry. The table there just gives you, I won't go through them, but it gives some detail of the different rootstocks that we'll be doing in this experiment. So basically every crop has got three different rootstocks, and I think rootstocks are going to be critical for narrow orchard systems to work in Australia, we're probably more concerned about lack of vigour with some of these dwarfing rootstocks and not being able to fill the canopy, as opposed to, environments like in New Zealand and even the United States, where they've got much deeper soils, they still have to try to contain the vegetative vigour on some of these dwarfing rootstocks.

So yeah, it, we're thinking that we might actually not be able to fill the actual allocated canopy space with in our environment with some of these rootstocks. Manjimup, focusing on apples, Loxton, apricot and looking at the combination of a few different cultivars as well as different rootstocks. The guys at SARDI will also, have also set up an experiment in Adelaide Hills on a, commercial property, Global orchards on cherry, where they'll be looking at not necessarily, it won't be a, a two meter row spacing. I think it's a three meter row spacing in the orchard, but there's a comparison between a vertical UFO system versus a V system, but again, no planar, very narrow canopies, which is, of course, a significant component of this project, component of this project as well. And Kevin Dodds has been trying to establish a demonstration site at, in Batlow and he's got a guy up there who's just planting an orchard at the moment, three metre row spacing on a cordon system in other words, 2. 4 metres between the trees with eight leaders on each one of those trees, eight vertical leaders and aiming to get to a 3. 5 metre canopy height. So, Kevin's quite excited about this project, as we all are, but, Kevin in particular is, he's an extension officer and pretty keen to make sure that they have a significant contribution to make for their growers in this narrow orchard systems.

UQ are going to do studies on digital twin simulations, University of Queensland that is. Liqi is obviously the main person to do this work. So, he's really got two main components of work. The first one here is on orchard design to maximise lighter deception. So he's I'll just hit the down button to show a, a LiDAR scan of, trees that we actually did a few years ago at Tatura, but what, Liqi is going to be doing is first of all, calibrate and validate his light simulator model that he's got, which basically picks up on a digital twin that you create from a LiDAR image. Our first bit of work that we'll do is to make sure that Existing light simulator is is appropriate and works for, stone and palm fruit.

He's obviously done a lot of work in tropical fruits to develop the light simulator, and our job, first of all, is to make sure it works for our crops. So we'll be comparing what might, what gets generated from his simulation model using LiDAR scans of canopies of pome and stone fruit trees compared with our physical measures of light interception with the, for example, the light trolley shown in the photo there on the right. So that's the first sort of cab off the rank. And then the plan is to build a tool that can be used by industry to help best design an orchard for a particular environment so that it can maximize light interception, and of course, what I mean by light interception is a combination of total light interception by the tree, but also light distribution down through the canopy, because that's obviously critical.

And the third dot point there is that Liqi will do a bit of work on exploring the relationships between what gets simulated by the model in terms of light incidence on at a particular point within the canopy and fruit colour and floral initiation. So I'm quite excited about that last dot point because I think, I've got an opportunity here to use the technology, i. e. LiDAR and optical images to automatically capture this really large and rich data set that then we can look at establishing relationships between that light incident at any point in the canopy and what it's doing in terms of the productivity of the crop.

The other bit of work that Liqi's group will do is on sprayer designed for narrow orchard systems to maximize obviously spray efficiencies. So again, he's already got a model that he developed for tropical fruits and he'll validate that for pome and stone fruit, temperate crops in other words. Then the second dot point there is about designing a sprayer for narrow orchard systems that actually maximises the efficiency of application. So, the photos there are just giving you some idea of the different options of sprayers that, firstly, what we currently use on the far left there, that's our air blast sprayer we've got at Tatura. Secondly, that those over the row type sprayers that are common, well, not common, but they are used in viticulture. Thirdly, a very, simple sprayer that isn't an air blast. It's just basically using pressure to apply the spray. If we're talking about a thin canopy, maybe that's all we need. And the last sprayer there on the right it's a tower sprayer. That one there is only 2 metres high, but you can get them that are, I think, are about 3. 5 metre high tower sprayer. It's got a , I forgot the name of the fan on it, but it's like a vertical fan as a I think they're quite, that to me will be just off the top of my head, I think that's one of the preferences I'd be using for narrow orchard systems, a sprayer like that. The other as I said earlier, it's really critical that we bring along the ag tech and sensors that are appropriate and for narrow orchard systems, not only appropriate, but it actually could make narrow orchard systems work better, perform better, be more profitable, in other words. During the progress of this project will be testing and evaluating, demonstrating various bits of AgTech. And I've got in brackets there in that first dot point about it's going to be governed by the Project Reference Group. So that was Hort Innovations idea was to bring along the Project Reference Group with what AgTech might be available, but also have their inputs in turn, where the gaps in equipment might lie, and of course, one of the first things that the growers, when we've had discussions with them about is two metre row spacing. They're going to struggle to get a bin down the row. Well, so, you know, think about, well, what ag tech can we actually use to overcome a problem that would have been the lack of manoeuvrability of a bin being carted up and down a row? So anyway, here's some, some of the things that we've bounced around and got, ideas of what we might use, whether it's autonomous, something like a Burro which is shown in that photo on the left hand side there. There's a autonomous tractor as well with a tower sprayer. That's the tower sprayer I was mentioning before with the higher boom on the back. In the middle there is, it's doesn't, it's really hard to sort of see from that photo what it actually is, but that's a robotic harvester that's being developed by a company called Ripe Robotics in the Goulburn Valley, and their idea is to make the robotic harvester compact and small, which would be appropriate and suitable for a two meter row space orchard, narrow orchard systems in other words. And have, making them small enough and cheap enough that, of course, you can have multiple robotic harvesters. And the photo there on the right is the Smart Apply variable rate sprayer. That particular photo is the one we've got up at the Mildura Mid Area Smart Farm.

Ian, can I have a question? I guess that's Dave, is it? Yes, it is. Thank you. In in rainy Mildura, unfortunately. It's normally stinking hot, but it's not today. Are you guys going, do you have the equipment you need to manage your narrow rows? Or will you have to simulate some of the expected costs associated with this? Do you have narrow tractors and all the equipment you need?

Yeah, we do have narrow tractors, and the, even the air blast sprayer we've got will go down a two metre row. I'm pretty keen to progress the spray component of work of Liqi's because I want to purchase one of those, a sprayer that's more suitable to a narrow orchard system, right? In terms of, yeah, we've got, small enough slasher to go down the row. So we've got the equipment already to be able to manage the block, Dave. Oh yeah, thank you.

But it and this sort of leads on to this next up point in some ways, what you just brought up, Dave, because this one says, can existing orchard management technology actually be used in a narrow orchard system, right? And, and so we'll be looking at obviously we've, as I said, we've got the equipment already at Tatura to be able to, I'm not, I shouldn't answer for the others, other sites, by the way, maybe Tim can answer that question later, and I'm not sure if, Dario is out of the country at the moment, but, but it's not only that sort of obvious orchard equipment, but it's also things like, I've got examples here of a leaf blower and a Darwin flower thinner, and a hedger. So with those, you could easily argue, well you shouldn't need a lot of this equipment like a leaf blower and a hedger in a well managed narrow orchard system, a planar canopy, but growers are still cognizant as that mightn't be the case. They still might have to go up and down rows doing this sort of stuff, right? And particularly, I think of leaf blowing to allow better light through the canopy, and maybe if we do have more vigour than we anticipate, and we don't have enough light going through the canopy onto the adjoining row, that a leaf blower technology might have actually had to be used. So, the question I'm proposing here is, can this equipment be used in narrow orchard systems?

And of course, the technology to capture data. Here I've got, I think I gave a presentation about Cartographer a few years ago, but, we obviously still heavily rely on Cartographer to take a lot of our measures within our experiments, and we'll be continuing to do that. But of course, it also has a lot of applications for commercial orchard management as well. And other sensors as well, I've got there a trunk dendrometer. At the moment they're either going through a LoRaWAN system of communication or a proprietary type communication into the mobile system. So, there's various options we're currently using. But I think Dario in Western Australia is pretty keen to progress this a bit more to come up with a more universal, I'll call it that, system of capturing, some of this sensor data and also in the interpretation of the data too. And I've got there a graph of, that's a trunk dendrometer showing it's shrinkage and swelling over a period of time of about, what is that, approximately a week during November and there's still a necessary human intervention there in interpreting that data. And I think what Dario's got in mind is trying to use AI to interpret a graph like that to determine whether trees need to be irrigated or not.

And the last slide with, it's not the last slide I think, but it's the last slide on the ag tech is to look at a couple of other ag technologies, one being the ability to actually size fruit in the orchard and automated retractable netting. We're definitely going to look at automated retractable netting at Tatura and this particular image here is video at least. It shows it's actually an orchard in Ardmona close by here where they put in a bit of a trial to see whether they could use automated retractable netting systems because, with these netting systems, you will start losing out in colour and even potentially crop load and fruit size. So, the idea is with the retractable netting, automated retractable netting, is you can draw it over when the conditions are appropriate for excessive amount of radiation or a hail event, etc. The other photo on the left there is, we've been here at Tatura just trying to develop a, on our platform harvester, you can see that there's a box on one of the platform harvester conveyor belts, which has actually got sensors in it to measure fruit quality, including, fruit size and colour. And the proposal in this project is, Dario's group are going to pursue something similar to that, whether it's feasible to be able to do it in a narrow orchard systems, because that platform harvester there, as you can see, is a bit wide for going down a two metre row spacing.

The profitable NOS concept represents an innovative, tech-ready design that will be resilient to climate and market uncertainty. The project will provide knowledge that supports an industry transition to:

* Safer orchards that attract a labour force.

* More profitable orchards due to lower operating cost (e.g., energy, labour).

* Uniform orchards that consistently produce high yields of quality fruit.

* Accelerated adoption of robotic and sensing technology.

* Climate resilient and environmentally sustainable orchards.

Stone and pome fruit orchard design is at a crossroad. Dwarfing rootstocks have enabled orchards to be planted at high density but there is still debate over canopy architecture (i.e., a narrow wall 2D canopy or a wider 3D structure like a spindle) despite growing evidence from Europe that there are substantial yield and quality benefits from narrow 2D canopies. Furthermore, row width and resultant tree height is dictated by existing machinery and fruit bin size such that canopies must be high to get comparable yields. The alternative is to narrow the row spacing to 2 metres and keep the tree canopy at a height that can be managed from the ground without ladders or platforms. Such orchard design, referred to as a narrow orchard system (NOS), is attractive to field workers and amenable to robotics, automation, sensing and crop protection, and has the potential to use less labour, energy and increase the efficiency of inputs.

The overall objective of this project is to provide orchard designs to maximise yield, fruit quality, climate resilience and the efficient use of labour and resources for pome and stone fruits. We propose that a narrow row two-dimensional (2D) 'pedestrian' orchard will meet these requirements. Planting trees in narrow 2 metre rows with trees spaced at 2 metres along the row and maintaining a narrow 2D canopy will increase the evenness of light as it passes through the foliage to maximise fruit quality whilst keeping tree costs equivalent to current high-density planting systems. Restricting the tree height to approximately 2 metres by grafting to the best dwarfing rootstocks will enable easy access for labour and remove the use of ladders, which represent a hazard for orchard operation. In addition, gains in the accuracy and efficiency of sensing and robot orchard operations (crop load estimation, pruning, thinning, pest and disease monitoring, fruit picking, etc.) are anticipated in narrow row 2D pedestrian orchards compared to existing tree training systems. In addition to field experiments to test this hypothesis, the project will undertake an economic study to determine the profitability and payback period of NOS and compare the benefits and costs to current standard practice.

The project will establish narrow row 2D orchards at the Tatura SmartFarm for cherry, nectarine, plum, apple and pear. Part of the orchard will be dedicated to comparing the performance of different dwarfing rootstocks and tree canopy heights in designed experiments. The remainder of the orchard will be established to demonstrate resource use efficiency, robotics, sensors and data integration (e.g., robotic harvester, autonomous bin pickups, low horsepower electric machinery, variable rate spray technology, automated retractable netting, spatial monitoring of yield and fruit quality, plug-and-play internet-based wireless (i.e., IoT) sensors for irrigation and pest detection, fruit tracking) as well as existing machinery (e.g., string flower thinners, pneumatic defoliators, hedger).

The design of NOS in future climate, the investigation of light distribution in the canopy and its impact on fruit quality, the innovation of a new sprayer (featuring low horsepower, good adaptability to narrow environment and high precision) as well as other measures of orchard uniformity and productivity will be supported by a digital-twin research component involving LiDAR scanning, artificial intelligence and computing experts from the University of Queensland.

Two satellite NOS sites will be established in Western Australia and South Australia. A satellite experimental narrow row 2D apple orchard will be established at the Manjimup research station in WA. Appropriate rootstocks for WA and different options for training trees as a planar cordon will be investigated. The site in WA will explore autonomous vehicles, mechanical pruning and auto field grading technology. Similarly, an experimental narrow row 2D apricot orchard will be established at the Loxton Research Centre in SA. Cultivar and rootstock will be investigated. An additional experiment in a commercial 2D cherry orchard in Adelaide Hills SA will be established to investigate the effects of training system and cultivar. All sites will be used to communicate results from the project and to demonstrate sensors, tracking technologies and data integration.

The Tatura SmartFarm (Vic), Batlow (NSW), Applethorpe (Qld), Adelaide Hills (SA) and the Manjimup (WA) and Loxton (SA) research stations will be used for field walks and events to communicate the NOS concept and associated technology to the pome and stone fruit industries as well as to service providers, policy makers, scientists and students.

Video transcript

Hi, my name's Ian Goodwin. I'm from Agriculture Victoria. We're at the Tatura Smart Farm today in the Narrow Orchard Systems experimental block.

I'm in front of the cherries. It's the 18th of March today, and what I'll quickly demonstrate is the laying down of the cordon. These trees, a bit of background. These trees were planted in September as a rod. We cut them back at planting. Subsequently, we went through in late November, early December, removed the shoots that were coming out of the top of the tree because they're extremely vigorous and come out a very steep angle, and the shoots that are remaining here are what grew subsequently. So, to lay it down, I've already laid down this one on this side, as you can see. So I'm just going to lay down this shoot on the other side here, and just put a couple of clips on the tree to hold the cordon in position. I'll probably put in three because what might happen is that the end of this shoot will probably turn and start growing, growing up like that, which is fine because that could be our, the outer vertical leader from the cordon. There's a couple of shoots here too that I'll just take out that we don't want anymore, and there's a root stock that's coming up there, which I'll chop out as well, and that's it.

These are the nectarines. As you can see, this tree has got, multiple shoots coming off where we actually cut it back to the cordon wire after planting. We've already been through previously and cut some of these out above the cordon wire. And as you can see, now in March, they're strong enough and large enough to lay down. As I said, multiple shoots coming out here and we only want to pick two of them to lay down, which I'll show in a second. And also, compared with cherry, we've got a lot of these, what are called selectic side shoots coming off the main shoot going up here. But yeah, pretty simple to just bend this over this time of year without it breaking, and clipping it onto the wire, and I'll just put on a couple of clips.

and then yeah, there's quite a number of those selectics that I, I want just stub them back down the cordon, and then of course we select the vertical leaders from this cordon that'll be spaced at about 50 centimetres apart because of the nature of the nectarines, fruiting on lateral wood. And of course, towards the end of that those laterals. So, we'll space, these vertical leaders at 50 centimetres apart along this wire.

We are in the plum in the narrow orchard systems experiment. In this particular tree here again, we purchased them as a rod. They were cut off just above the cordon wire, and obviously multiple shoots have arisen. We did go through like the other crops in December and removed the shoots that were, above or close to that cordon wire. I've already laid down a couple of cordons here, and so these are the remaining shoots that we want to take out. So, I'll quickly, take these out without cutting off the cordon by mistake. There's a sucker there. Which we'll cut back. You can rip these out. The ones up the top there. Pretty simple. And of course, cutting back these shoots selectics that have risen off the cordon. I'm just stubbing them back for now. And next year of course we'll create the structure of the vertical leaders and space them out on the plums.

Now we're in the Apple in the Narrow Orchards experiment and I'm going to demonstrate, laying down the cordon. In this particular tree here it obviously again was, cut off when we when they were planted, and any shoots coming out of above that wire been broken off here, ripped out in other words, which is fine. But what I wanted to show here is how this particular, strong shoot coming up here, rather than try and lay it down that way, I'll actually lay it to avoid it cracking or splitting away from the main trunk. I'm going to lower it, lay it down so it's crossing over arching it like that so that so that it doesn't break away from the trunk of the tree. And again, just clipping it on. And then it's not long enough, but I'll just leave that shoot there. I'll lay down this one for you. It's pretty simple. This one here, just laying it down. Putting a second clip on here a fair way along towards it because in the next month or so, this will probably turn up a bit. If we had it, if we clipped it back here, it'd come start coming up too far back, which is not what we want. And then yeah, just taking out that other shoot here and just stubbing that back, and that's it.

Video transcript

Hi, my name's Ian Goodwin from Agriculture Victoria. We are at the Tatura Smart Farm today within the Narrow Orchard Systems experimental block. I'm with Luca Corelli Grappadelli from University of Bologna. Hi here. Nice to be here.

So we're in the cherries as part of the the Narrow Orchard Systems experiment and looking at one of the trees where we laid down Cordons last winter. There's a video on, laying down those cordons and some of the bud selections that we did. So now we're in middle of February looking at the vertical shoot growth. Yeah, it looks real nice. You have them evenly spaced and fairly, even. More or less, all of them have set terminals except for this guy here. Well, do you think that'll pose you a problem or how would you handle this lateral growth and more vigorous growth you have on this chute? Yeah, so these laterals, you know, you can either snap them off or, or, or, or cut them with some secateurs, right? Just to create that single vertical shoot to keep it growing. And I'd like to see these ones that are terminated here doing exactly the same, but they haven't. And overall, I mean, this is a very vigorous vertical leader coming off close to the trunk, so it's more vigorous than all the rest. So I don't really like it, right, in itself. Yep. We could, you know, cut it, cut it back and get another chute to come up just to slow the vigour in this one here. Like you could choose one of the two laterals over there. Yeah, yeah. There's one down here, for example, so you could cut it there and looks like, you know, that be a replacement. But yeah, it's, it's probably the time of year to try to do that. You reckon there's still time left for it to regrow and catch up with the others? Well, if it doesn't, you know, grow to catch up with the others [00:02:00] this year, it definitely, you know, will next year. Yeah. A good thing would be that these have set terminals so they probably aren't going to go anywhere else, but they might be still growing by the looks of it. There's vigour in there. Yep. So they should catch up.

Alright, so we're looking at this tree Ian. This guy was laid down recently because this is this year's growth, but it's showing already some good lateral growth, and you've got good growth over there. Can you lay out your plan for the training for the remaining of the summer?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So on, on this side here, we've got a lot of really good laterals that have come out of that cordon which we will try to select them as our vertical leaders and space them out. I would be cutting back these ones close to the trunk, right? Even ripping out, some of these that's too low. But yeah, just to try to reduce the vigour in these ones close to trunk, but they're out here. Select the ones that are appropriate to clip up to where the, you definitely want uniformity in the size of the ones that you choose. Yeah, to a certain extent. I'm more worried about, you know, any vertical leaders that are coming out close to trunk being, they might look the same now, but they're the ones that'll outcompete the rest. Like, you know what we're seeing over here there's a lot of strong vertical leaders coming out of here and there's, as yet nothing much come out of there. So I, over this side, something starting to happen, but it's still some, yeah. I'd probably be removing the ones that are going the wrong direction. But, that you don't want that as well. But then this one remaining and that one I'd probably just take him back to a stub. Right. And this one here would be the same, you know, you might take it back to a stub.

So this is the nectarines in the Narrow Orchard Systems experiment. We've got only four leaders per tree. In other words, each vertical leaders spaced at 50 centimetres apart, and there's a bit of a variation here in each one of those vertical leaders. So, Luca maybe some comments on what we might do with each one of these vertical leaders. Yeah Ian, and I think this tree is a perfect example, example of how shoots will develop through the season. So this guy here is obviously coming from behind because there was a stub there, but you know, you still have a fairly vertical growth, no laterals. Some, some beginning to emerge. Move on two weeks, you'll get into this situation. This is still not problematic because there is distance between the lateral tips and the epical tips. Here is another couple of weeks further down the line and the competition is getting closer to the top of the branch, which is what you want to keep growing, and you have to be on your toes now maybe removing them or stubbing them. Definitely you want to stub them before you get to this situation because here, 1, 2, 3, 4, they're all at the same height, and this means the central leader is losing power of controlling and these guys are taking over. So, my suggestion. So if we just. Absolutely. These, cut these back. Exactly. And, and maybe that guy there too. Yeah. Right. And then on this tree I'd actually, I would say that's a wise move. You don't really want much else for now because you want to create the canopy. If they regrow, there'll be time in the winter to look at the situation and decide whether you can hang a crop next year or not. Yep. Great.

Okay, Ian. So here we're in the plums. Variety's Angelino and the uprights are placed at about 25 centimetres spacing. There is in general good growth, but there are situations that require a bit of attention, like the tree we're looking at. Can you give me some comments on that? Yeah, so already someone's been through and done some big cuts, removing some pretty thick vertical leaders that have come out there and trying to space them out, which is great. I think that's quite good. Our, that one's, it will go, yeah, it will go. The, the concern is this vertical leader here, and so Luca's, right. I'm sort of half thinking, we need to cut it out. What's your opinion? Either cut him out or come back to something. I don't think you need to be extremely geometrically correct. So go with the opportunities. To me, this is too vigorous and the top is already heavy. Yeah. But taking it all out, it might suffer from competition. So I'd probably give it a go over there and see how it does. And hopefully this will give you a nice regrowth and fix him. Yep.

Now we're in the apples in the Narrow Orchard Systems experiment. This is Pink Eve. It's on M nine rootstock. We found it's not nearly as vigorous as a lot of other apple cultivars we've worked with. We weren't able to pull down all of the cordons ideally during winter. So in front of me, Luca, you might have a couple of suggestions to make with this tree. Well, first suggestion I have, this is normal in the orchard so we don't need to be too concerned with the beauty of the tree. The important concern is the spacing between the uprights because that dictates light interception. But other than that, I think there's freedom to choose and perhaps bring back or forward some of the laterals. So this guy here, Ian, I think needs to come down. First of all, you go right down or, or just to, this one seems to me a bit, a bit, a bit too tight here. Okay. Then you might have a regrowth like crazy. So I'd be happy for this one to just come here and then we may have to select, so this looks like a good candidate. I'll keep him. So I'll cut that. Right. And we have to decide which ones we look better here and these two seem to be already a bit too vigorous to me. So yeah, I would do that. They go, and this is our natural candidate, and in a few weeks it could be tied up with this and give us a nice upright here. Yeah. Yeah. And so these other verticals, we could actually, could this wire, bring them back? Yes. And it's already in place. And do this so that these are spaced at 25 centimetres apart each one of these vertical leaders in the apples. And this last one even, we could probably put this around here and I'd actually probably put a clip down lower here to just to just keep it, yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good idea. Good idea. So would you keep the laterals? I probably, yeah. There is a debate on that. They're actively growing, like, you know, you could stub it back, right? But this here is quite nice. We've, we've kept them, we've kept them back in Bologna. I'd probably stub that because it's actively growing, right, but leave the rest there.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Alessio Scalisi from Agriculture Victoria, and I want to give you a quick update on the activities of the Narrow Orchard Systems for Future Climates project that we carried out at the Tatura SmartFarm in the last 12 months. So, we have two main sites at Tatura. The main experimental block with five crops, pears, apples, plums, nectars, and cherries. You can see the cultivar, said root stocks combinations in the top table. And the tree spacing and row spacing is standard two by two. And then we've got different leader spacing for each crop with 33 centimetres for the pears, 25 centimetres for apples and plums, 50 centimetres for the nectarines, and 20 centimetres for the cherry, which of course leads to different number of leaders per Hectares as you can see in this slide.

The second site we have at Tatura is a demonstration block with 11 rows, 10 of which are PE on M9 with double cordons and two by two metre spacing and a two-metre height. Then we have an extra row of Bigbucks on M9 with a single cordon and one metre spacing between trees. We are running into little demonstrations in this block. One is on leader training with plastic clips jute twine, plus plastic clips, and then bamboo stakes plus metal clips. And then we are running a second demonstration using, Progibb and Cytolin to announce fast establishment of tree architecture.

In terms of preliminary results, we are seeing that in Apple, a CG202 had the largest leader growth. In Cherry, the Gisela 12 was the slowest at developing its leaders. In nectarines Rootpac 20 had generally shorter shoots, but not significant differences and in plants we haven't seen really clear patterns. Again, in terms of trunk cross-sectional area in apple CG202 had the largest trunks, whereas in cherry the Gisela 12 had the smaller trunks than other root stocks. In nectarines, there was a gradient from [00:02:00] Rootpac 20 to Rootpac 40 to Warootone, and in plums Rootpac R developed the smallest trunks.

And regarding pruning dry weights in Apple, again, the largest pruning mass was cut of CG202 trees. Whereas in cherry, nectarine and plum pruning weights were similar in different root stocks. The only crops that were able to flower this year were apple and nectarine, and you can see that G41 and M9 had a tendency to produce more flowers per tree compared to CG202. Whereas in nectarines we have seen a tendency for Rootpac 40 to produce more flowers per tree, which is in line with findings from previous research where we've seen Rootpac 40 doing better compared to traditional rootstock in terms of crop load and return bloom.

We have also successfully used Green Atlas cartographer to scan the narrow orchard systems experimental site, and this is possible because we developed some new narrow scanning models algorithms with Green Atlas. You can see on the left the pairs have a smaller leaf area, and that's due to the establishment being a bit late compared to the other crops due to initial problems we had with the nursery material. And then there was a bit of we, so we estimated the leaf area and you can see the effects of the different root stocks are similar to what we have seen previously in the previous slides. And particularly in cherries, the Green Atlas detected a significant difference in, with Gisela 12 having a much smaller leaf area than Krymsk 5 and Stallion.

Our results on support structures for our upright leaders show that plastic clips are a bit behind compared to jute twine and by mistakes in establishing the leader height we wanted to achieve, which is 2 metres in this case. As you can see in the figures here. In terms of cost the clips alone are much cheaper than the other two options in terms per Hectare.

Now we are also using a simple Excel tool to calculate the number of fruit per leader based on the assumption that we had an ideal fruit weight in mind and a target yield per Hectare. For example, if we had an ideal food weight of 225 grams for an apple and we wanted to achieve, 130 tons per Hectare then we will need to put around 31 pieces of fruit per leader in our system.

We are using several technologies at Tatura and some examples are in the slides. For example, the scissor lift on the left. We use it to operate the netting and the rain covers. Then we have just procured the Kisui Adam autonomous robot with a mower underneath. And then we are procuring a little toe behind weed sprayer that we can attach to our Burro. And then we procured a new narrow vehicle to put cartographer on so that we can drive up and down the narrow rows of our blocks.

Then we have a PhD student Harry Singh fully dedicated to this project as a collaboration between Agriculture Victoria and the University of Queensland. And Harry is using LiDAR, two different types of LiDAR to reconstruct canopy shapes and tree architecture to the finest detail. He's also working in collaboration with the Bioeconomy Science Institute in New Zealand.

This slide just summarizes Agriculture Victoria's outputs in the last twelve months since our last PRG meeting.

Thank you for listening to me and let me know if you have any questions.

Transcript

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Batlow Planar Cordon demonstration site, which is part of the Narrow Orchard Systems Project. We're here in the third week of March 2026, and just going to give you a bit of an update on where we've ended up in here after three seasons of establishment so far. This is our 12th update video in this block since the project started. So, if you'd like to see where we've come from with this and some of the issues that we're face, certainly visit the HIN website, Horticulture Industry Network website, and navigate to narrow orchard systems, apples. And you'll be able to access the links to those 11 videos so far that give a really good summary of where we've been and how we've gotten to where we are now. So, our collaborating grower here, Jeremy Smart and myself, we keep in regular contact about the progress of this block and discussing the issues that we encounter and our thoughts about managing the tree response.

I know that Jeremy's very excited about what we've achieved here, in the last three seasons in terms of establishing a Planar Cordon canopy. So, we've got probably on average maybe a metre to two metres vertical growth that we still need to achieve to reach the canopy height that we're ultimately aiming for. But, after three years and with some challenges, we're starting to get something that actually looks very doable on this Cosmic crisp on Nic 29 Rootstock. Which we weren't certain of when we started out, but as we go on, we're getting more confident that this system is going to fill the canopy and that we're going to have some good structure and ultimately a nice productive block with lots of fruitful material in here.

As we head towards the end of the third growing season here, the two issues that Jeremy and I have been discussing most recently relate to firstly some long lateral growth that we had in some trees this season. So, this particular tree I'm looking at here now is responded quite well. It's not too vigorous. The lateral growth is fairly ideal. We've got some nice, relatively short units here which should become fruitful hopefully next season. And then if we move along to the next tree down, it seems somewhat more vigorous. And we've got quite a large upright here. This one, which is quite thick and its growth response is showing us that it's quite strong. So, we've got a lot of lateral growth that's sort of up to 40, 50 centimetres long, and so we've been discussing how to deal with that.

Back in the narrow orchard systems demo block week after recording that video about a couple of challenges with strong verticals and long laterals, a week ago. And we've got some advice from a couple sources. I'd like to acknowledge the project leader Ian Goodwin for his input, and also horticultural consultant, Marcel Veens, for his suggestions about this. And from all that, what Jeremy and I have decided to do is come through and identify some of the verticals that are really restricting the SAP flow and growth further down the cordon and come through and remove those now, and where possible select a replacement. If not we're hoping to get some regrowth from the stump cut that we do to produce a new vertical.

Here's an example of one of the verticals that we're going to remove. You can see that the diameter of the upright there is at least equal to, if not greater than the diameter of the Cordon heading out from the v. So, time to go for this one, sadly. So, we've, I've already cut this one. I'll just take it out and as luck would have it on the base of that cut there was already a long lateral that I could bend up into position. So, we do have a replacement already in position there, which will be behind the others in growth. But hopefully that allowing these verticals further out to put on a bit more growth before it gets established again. And hopefully we can get that to crop and settle more quickly.

So that's it for our Autumn 2026 update. Again, Jeremy and I are very happy with the progress in the Planar Cordon trees in this remaining part of the demo site. And we've learned quite a lot already this season. Our confidence is growing in terms of establishing this type of system, and our thinking is heading towards long-term management already. So, that's all good. And looking forward to spring 2026 and we'll bring you an update as soon as we've got some news on how these come out with flowering and what they look like after fruit set. But for now, thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next video. Bye for now.

Transcript

Hello, welcome to the Western Australia update on the narrow orchard system project. Since the PRG in March, 2025, we performed the, we collected the usual growth measurements such as trunk dendrometers and all of those kind of things. And regular, and we performed the regular training to select vertical shoot for the application of the canopy systems specifically. We also perform an in-depth soil analysis, including structural and water retention because we noticed there was a slight difference in growth in certain areas of the orchard, and due to that testing, we ended up noticing that the water retention was pretty low in general. The best was 15% and the lowest was 18%.

But we also statistically identified that was, was actually applied randomly towards systems. So it's not actually affecting the results from the project. A slight result from the growth during winter, up to winter, so first year growth the target was of that, this is the length of the shoots that we measured. And the target was one metre because it is two metres between the trees. The tree planted in the middle and the then the two shoots are actually bent once we reach, they reach one metre. And so only in winter, the first year, only CG202 did reach actually that specific target and actually only on two varieties. The A14 did not. But, that there was, so there was a bit of an interaction with the rootstock and cultivar. This is just to show that in all the different trainings, the there was an effect of the cultivar on the thickness of the diameter. So that makes it easier or not to bend the chutes in the correct format in the shape and so it, and it'll need sometimes to take care of during the bending to avoid the breaking of the shoots.

During, in the second year growth, however we were very happy with the actual growth that with the most of the combination actually already reaching the two metres and then having selected all the eight shoots that the vertical shoots, and we are very happy with actually ease the current growth in all of the combination most of the time. There is this some variability between trees, but we are very, we are happy and with this vertical shoots ranging between 35 to actually 40 centimetre to over a metre in some combination. So we think that they will actually be able to reach the canopy, the full canopy in the next season.

Here is as to show that eventually, like I said, during this, during the season, the double over, double crossover, the Cordon is still growing correctly and it was a successful application.

Here it is, we see some, the single cordon, which at this time we needed to actually have the distance, the full distance between the trees, so it is two metres length for each single shoot before start growing the verticals. And some of them reached, some of them they did not. And it was, it looks like it's more depending on the, on trees, on single trees, then an actual full combination. We also had two additional rows of 2D canopy shapes in with all the different combinations to be used in the comparison. This is not officially part of the projects, but we want to use it as a demonstration for growers. As a part of the technology data that we have in Manjimup, we acquired the Frucotec platform, which is a fully electric working platform with various formats. On the right is the seating format, so for all the work that can be done low on the ground, while on the left is on the, working format where you can actually perform all different management such as thinning, pruning, and things like that. While instead here we have the harvest format. Which is slightly different and there is the spot in the middle for the beams. But we also are working with Outback robotics to develop a fruit sorter. It is an optional upgrade and update for that one. Hopefully during our meeting next week, I hope to have acquired some of the pictures and some things to show you more on how does it look like the fruit sorter. Still as a technology update, we finalized the PAR Light interception for on the ground. And as well as we acquired the thermal imaging to identify, to work better, to figure correlation, so between the temperature, irrigation, and eventually defects, such as like sunburn.

This is just to remind, to see that, to show that we had a field day last year and they had that we were happy with the attendance and there was a lot of interest from the technology by the growers, and during this year we had quite a few outputs. We can discuss better during the PRG. The only thing is when we released the information on the Frucotec, we had a really high interest by media. As planned activities, we planned to take the normal measurement, the usual standard measurement, but this year, we'll actually during the PRG, we'll discuss a bit more on the strategy for eventually fruiting some of those shoots and in which position and which combinations. And I would also like to discuss with you better input on also the mulching. We prefer, we thinking of mulching because of that, what I discussed before, very low water retention capacity, which creates a bit of an issue with the irrigation, and I would like to discuss also, orchard subnetting, which I'm having some issue in acquiring some the material I would like. And with this, I would like to thank you, and these two further slides are just a reminder of what we actually do have planted in Manjimup as part of the experiment.

Transcript

Good afternoon folks. I have met I think most of you previously, but if we haven't, my name's Ken Breen. I'm leading the team for the BSI team, connected with the Narrow Orchards program, and over the next few moments, I'll just be giving a brief update of what we've been up to since we rejoined the program in the middle of last year.

As we do, we joined in about July last year, and essentially, we've got two primary roles in the program. Firstly, some research which I'll be describing shortly, in this we aim to answer a couple of questions. Firstly, what is the impact of the design, tree design or configuration number of uprights in planer systems, that kind of thing, on yield or on the harvest index? How can we balance the annual growth and the standing growth of the tree with yield, which is obviously our economic target. Secondly what is the most appropriate training designed to establish an narrow row pedestrian orchards? And to do this, we've got a number of experiments underway, one in some. pears at Tatura and then a couple in commercial cherry and apricot blocks in New Zealand. So, the first area is research. A second area is some scientific and technical support for both the research teams involved in our orchard systems, the program staff and as well as that growers across Australia.

So, the first area of work we've been working on is the I guess the influence of growing systems on Harvest index in pears. For this, we're using a mature block of pears at Tatura station. And we're looking at a number of factors, which I'll talk about shortly on the effect on the allocation of dry matter to the tree components, the fruit versus the annual prunings versus a semi-permanent structure or the permanent structure, and obviously trying to maximize allocation to fruit. Which is what the second point here is, how can we maximize the annual dry matter allocation to fruit as opposed to vegetative growth, which we then have to prune off. So these are some images, images, the various factors involved, or dwarfing versus a vigorous root stock, and then two tree form factors, if you like, that we're looking at. Firstly, the spacing of what we might call center leader trees in the row. Either the trees are spaced at two metres apart or one metre apart in the row, or half a metre apart in the row down the row. And the second thing is the number of uprights between one and six uprights. This is a example of six uprights four, two, and one upright per trunk. The uprights are always spaced at half a metre apart. So, in fact these are single trees spaced at half a metre apart and that's the second area of work. And then what we've done to start off, how far have we got we've calculated or in the process of calculating the standing size from last winter, we are investigating three ways of doing that. Firstly, physical measurements, which we did in just before bud break versus image analysis, which is just images using, like this one here in the bottom with an iPhone camera versus LiDAR.

This is a point cloud from a LiDAR image that we've taken, and that is that brown ball in the middle is actually a tennis ball, which gives us a reference size for the rest of the tree. This is the same tree. However, the LiDAR was working from the one side of the tree and the camera took the photograph from the other side of the tree. So, you can see some distinctive form of a tree here that that it's the same tree. It's just from different sides of the tree. So we're starting calculating winter standing size. We'll repeat that this coming winter. We've got summer pruning weights, which we collected and we've just done some harvest weights in unfortunately a very light, in fact an off season this year. We had intended that this, we would only do one season of work. But we may in fact have to do two seasons because of the very light crop in this season. So that's the pears. This is now work on cherries and this, we're using a [00:05:00] newly established block of cherries in central Otago in New Zealand. It's about what are they, three years old. Just finished a third season, I think. And here we wanted to look at the influence of a number of uprights on light transmission within the canopy, and particularly how it impacts flowering and fruiting in these upright shoots ultimately understanding how dry matter is allocated in the fruit, and in the tree and dry matter is allocated to fruit in the tree.

So, some questions, for example, do fewer upright shoots increase the number of flowers and fruit in the lower canopy? So obviously if we are reducing upright numbers, there's a potential to be reducing potential yield, but the converse of that is it might actually increase the number of flowers and fruit in the lower part of the canopy and it might compensate it for it. And actually the quality, particularly the size of the fruit, might increase with better light relations in the bottom of the canopy, and particularly in cherries as we know fruit size has a strong premium. And so, the value of the crop might actually increase significantly despite having fewer uprights and possibly fewer fruit.

So here we've got just some examples. So, these are the planer cordon systems. The work we'll be doing is we'll be looking at either five or six uprights per cordon. So, this has six uprights. This should have six, but the end ones are distal ones are a little bit late in developing. So we'll test either five or six upright shoots per cordon. Doesn't sound like a necessarily a big difference, but it does shift the uprights from say, 20 centimetres apart to 25 centimetres apart to 30 centimetres apart, which could be significant in terms of light penetration into the canopy. Here we are just measuring some baseline light interception at the beginning of the of the research.